By Soner Ça?aptay
According to Forbes Magazine, Turkey, with 13 billionaires, counts among the top 11 countries with the most billionaires, tied with Brazil. Before the financial crisis hit last year, Turkey had 35 billionaires. Turkey is rich in billionaires because it has a billionaire-making machine: Istanbul, the country’s business capital and home to over 40 percent of the Turkish economy.
For more than three decades, Istanbul’s unique geography has nurtured the emergence of a social class of billionaires benefiting from government contracts. As the world’s only city divided between two continents, Istanbul has twice seen the construction of suspension bridges uniting the country across the Bosphorus Strait, which bifurcates the city. Those bridge projects, completed in 1973 and 1988, respectively, facilitated massive economic growth: The unification of Istanbul’s parts has twice produced a city economy larger than the sum of its parts. That, in turn, led to the emergence of two generations of billionaires. Lucrative government contracts for the construction of bridges and beltways and land speculation deals facilitated the billionaire-making process each time the city built a bridge.
Now, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP’s, plans to build a third bridge across the Bosphorus, a move that would further unite Istanbul’s disparate halves and spur economic growth in Turkey’s business capital. The AKP’s move, however, also promises the birth of a third and starkly different generation of Turkish billionaires – one beholden to the AKP’s political, social and foreign policy agenda.
Turkey’s billionaires have traditionally been the standard-bearers of secular, Western, liberal values in Turkey, loyal to the secular governments that produced them. In the 1970s, the building of the First Bosphorus Bridge helped pro-government businesses, which benefited from the emergent synergy of Istanbul’s economy created by the bridge’s beltway, which united the city for the very first time.
Turkey’s first class of billionaires coalesced in the business association the Turkish Association of Businessmen and Industrialists, or TÜSIAD, which became a voice for secular, Western Turkey. TÜSIAD promoted free-market economics, and once that was set in place, pushed for European Union accession in the 1990s and 2000s. It also became a patron of Western values in the country, promoting democratic freedoms, setting up world-class universities, and funding cultural activities ranging from Istanbul’s jazz and film festivals to private museums that brought to the Turks Picasso and Dali exhibits. TÜSIAD became the promoter and safety valve of European Turkey.